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Death Without Deterrence, or Why Tripwire Forces Are Not Enough

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Death Without Deterrence, or Why Tripwire Forces Are Not Enough
Paul Poast and Dan Reiter
June 17, 2021
 

Many people think that U.S. troops deployed abroad have only one function: to die in the event of war. Before conflict breaks out, troops are often deployed abroad in smaller numbers, too few or ill-equipped to stop or slow down an adversary’s invasion. Instead, the thinking goes, because their deaths would enrage the American public and thus trigger broader U.S. intervention, the adversary won’t attack. In short, these militarily ornamental “tripwire” forces are thought to promise peace through body bags.

This is the wrong way to think about the role of U.S. forces based abroad. Militarily inconsequential forces are surprisingly ineffective at deterring aggression, as we argue in a recent article in Texas National Security Review. Potential attackers will still strike if they believe they can achieve their territorial goals swiftly, winning a fait accompli before larger reinforcements can arrive.
 
Even if tripwire forces are killed in combat as an aggressor achieves its goals, the public might not get outraged and may instead look to exit rather than risk more losses, as occurred in Lebanon in the early 1980s, Somalia in the early 1990s and Afghanistan in 2021 — in the last case even though American casualties have slowed to a trickle and withdrawal will likely usher in a Taliban victory. Or, even if the public supports mobilizing to overturn such conquest, the aggressors might presume a democratic aversion to bloodshed: that the population of the democratic adversary would not have the stomach for a longer, bloodier war if presented with a new territorial status quo. Japan in 1941, Argentina in 1982, and Iraq in 1990 all made the same error of miscalculating that American and British populations would cry for peace rather than scream for war.

https://warontherocks.com/2021/06/death-without-deterrence-or-why-tripwire-forces-are-not-enough/

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